Empathy for ‘Adversaries’

Empathy is a term that connotes the touchy-feely notion of getting in touch with someone else’s feelings or perspective. That’s what psychotherapists and social workers do. It obviously has no place in the hard-knocks world of foreign affairs and national security. Or does it?

In world history, the best generals are experts in empathy. They know that to get the advantage, you have to put yourself in your adversary’s shoes, look at things from that perceived perspective, and try to predict what he or she would do under specific circumstances.

So why does the United States have trouble exhibiting empathy? It’s probably because the United States has been the globe’s most powerful nation since 1945 and is the most dominant military power in world history, both absolutely and relative to its contemporaries. In other words, empires don’t need empathy. Empathy is for sissies or, at least, lesser nations.

In reality, a lack of empathy toward potential adversaries is as dangerous for a superpower as it is for any other country. The United States found that out during Vietnam, but hasn’t seemed to retain the lesson very well. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were outnumbered five to one by the Americans alone (excluding the South Vietnamese), but they fought tenaciously because they were fighting to reunite their divided nation. They regarded the U.S. as reneging on an implicit pledge to have elections in a reunited Vietnam, which the communist Ho Chi Minh would have won.

U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson had the vague idea that communist dominos had to be stopped, feared he would get involved in an unwinnable quagmire, but nonetheless prosecuted the war anyway to avoid being accused by the Republican right-wing of “losing Vietnam,” as Harry Truman was accused of “losing China.” But LBJ only escalated the war after his Great Society domestic agenda had passed. (Any parallels to Barack Obama’s current situation in Afghanistan are purely coincidental.)

LBJ has been criticized for not letting the U.S. military win the war—in other words, putting too many restrictions on its operations. Yet LBJ’s micromanagement of the military made more sense when his real goals are unearthed. He did not believe the war was winnable; he merely wanted to put military pressure on the North Vietnamese to get a negotiated settlement, and he wanted to avoid provoking a military intervention by China, as occurred in the Korean conflict. Where LBJ made his mistake was in a lack of empathy for North Vietnamese persistence in throwing off foreign invaders and reunifying their country. They negotiated, but not seriously, and merely waited until U.S. popular opinion tired of the war. (Any similarity to the doggedness of the Taliban resistance in Afghanistan and their willingness to wait out the already tenuous U.S. resolve is merely happenstance.)

The U.S. also has lacked empathy with Iran. Iran is a theocratic, authoritarian country (but not entirely, as we’ve seen recently). Its president does make unnerving statements denying the Holocaust, but he doesn’t really have much of a say in national security issues. But even autocratic countries have legitimate security concerns. Iran lives in a rough neighborhood of hostile nations—the Sunni Arab states and Israel. That’s why any democratic revolution in Iran probably wouldn’t attenuate Iran’s desire for a nuclear program.

Thus, the U.S. policy of trying to negotiate away Iran’s nuclear capabilities lacks empathy and is naïve. And since the Iranians are fairly sophisticated in their foreign policy and know that Israel or the United States could attempt a military strike against their nuclear facilities, they have probably hardened or buried many of them (if secret facilities even exist). Therefore, U.S. policy should shift to managing a nuclear Iran instead of trying to prevent what is probably inevitable.

For many of the same reasons, it is Pollyannaish and unempathetic to try to negotiate away North Korea’s existing nuclear capability. U.S. policy should take the same approach with the hermit kingdom.

The lack of U.S. empathy in Afghanistan has been covered. In Iraq, a lack of U.S. understanding that ethno-sectarian loyalties will always trump those to an artificial central state did not improve with a change in U.S. administration. Recognizing the existing partition and devolving more power to local and regional governments, rather than perpetuating the non-viable central government, is probably the only way to avoid a massive civil war.

The most flagrant U.S. denial of reality occurred during the recent Russo-Georgian war. The U.S. government and media focused on the autocratic Russian government’s “nefarious” intentions of maintaining security in its sphere of influence (after 25 million Russians died in an invasion by a foreign power in World War II, this is hardly a surprise) and ignored the Georgian shelling of a South Ossetian town (what many could call a war crime) to start the war.

The worst and most dangerous case of non-empathy, however, has been the lack of U.S. introspection after the heinous 9/11 attacks. Instead of reading Osama bin Laden’s clear writings to glean his motives for attacking, the American public, to its future peril, simply bought George W. Bush’s demagoguery that the U.S. was attacked because it was an economically and politically free country. That bin Laden specifically denied this accusation was lost in the drive to do more of exactly what bin Laden was mad about in the first place—U.S. forces invading and occupying Muslim soil, thus making things worse by aiding the recruitment of the anti-U.S. Islamists worldwide.

There are notorious dictatorships and terrorists in the world, but their threat to the United States has been exaggerated as an excuse to fulfill the foreign policy agendas of certain politicians, bureaucracies, or interest groups. Instead, the U.S. should realize that even these outlaws have security fears and are not just hostile to the United States because it is a relatively free country.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are those of the individual contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the LA Progressive, its publisher, editor or any of its other contributors.

About Ivan Eland

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He also has served as Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), and has testified on the military and financial aspects of NATO expansion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on CIA oversight before the House Government Reform Committee, and on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Dr. Eland is the author of The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy, as well as The Efficacy of Economic Sanctions as a Foreign Policy Tool. He is a contributor to numerous volumes and the author of 45 in-depth studies on national security issues.

His articles have appeared in American Prospect, Arms Control Today, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Emory Law Journal, The Independent Review, Issues in Science and Technology (National Academy of Sciences), Mediterranean Quarterly, Middle East and International Review, Middle East Policy, Nexus, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Conservative, International Journal of World Peace, and Northwestern Journal of International Affairs. Dr. Eland’s popular writings have appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, Sacramento Bee, Orange County Register, Washington Times, Providence Journal, The Hill, and Defense News. He has appeared on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” PBS, Fox News Channel, CNBC, Bloomberg TV, CNN, CNN “Crossfire,” CNN-fn, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC), Canadian TV (CTV), Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, BBC, and other local, national, and international TV and radio programs.

Comments

Eland passionately argues for ’empathy’ for the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and in our time Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, Mugabe, Bashir.

As long as empathy for others guides your own vigorous and reasoned actions to support your own values and interests, fine. As long as your ’empathy’ is based on clear fact, OK.

But watch out when empathy for enemies subtly changes into a misguided sympathy for enemies vs friends, and an excuse to do less or nothing to advance your own values and interests. And watch out when the ‘facts’ proposed on which to base empathy are dubious and based on wishful suppositions (e.g. that A-jad & co. aren’t really still in control in Iran, or that A-jad really doesn’t mean business with Israel, or that bin Laden’s public excuses fully match and exhaust his real ones, or anyhow are themselves excused by George Bush’ lies).

What’s truly interesting is Eland’s studied lack of empathy with the everyday viewpoint of most of us ordinary folk in this world, American and others. This viewpoint says: ‘I would like to have empathy for dictators and outlaws and all those other criminals oppressing or threatening me and others – but past a certain point, no matter what empathy I have, I must act in sympathy with – and indeed to save – my own values and interests.

Yes, whether viewed exaggeratedly or not, the actions or threats of various dictators and terrorists in this world indeed animate the ‘agendas’ of ‘special interest groups’ to engage the USA to help do something in time to curb and preferably stop these nasties. Thank goodness!

Los Angeles

Michael Krikorian: There may be more doomed locales in town – the coroner’s identification room, a hospice where the only hope is that the end will soon come – but, for a mass gathering of gloom, nothing beats the CJ crowd on a Sunday.